Page sculpting and rel=nofollow have quietly crept forward as a new discussion point among those in the SEO trade.
This is not always true, but it trends towards betting odds: if it’s hotly debated, and experts with a vested interest are saying it’s worthless, it’s probably worth investigating.
Fact is, canonicalization, aside from being damned hard to spell, works. So does page sculpting, and so does limiting the outflow of “authority” or link juice or whatever you want to call a normal outgoing link.
The key to all of these is that, compared to soliciting quality inbound links and on-page SEO, they’re more work and usually lesser gain.
If you’re ranking in the top ten and hitting a ceiling, though – give it a shot. It’s not neighborly, but it’s ethical unless you’ve promised a “real” link in an exchange.
And exchanging links, sadly, is no longer what it used to be – thank the link vendors for that one (and use the A B C model if you’re corrupted… or have enough domains to go for it legitimately in a real value-for-value exchange).
The mules don’t give a horsefly’s survival for sculpting and nofollow links, blogs are blogs.
But if you’ve got a scrappy domain with a permanent content architecture, consider who you link to in the first place – and if it’s borderline (possibly of interest or use to your visitors, maybe) – give it a nofollow.
If Google says a technique is not “illegal” but is of limited value, the mules have found this generally translates to “it’ll game the algorithm more than we’d like, so we’ll pretend it doesn’t work until we tweak to the point we can admit it did, but we fixed it now.”
Save a Google Engineer, promote a challenge that doesn’t harm others, can put you a notch forward on rankings, and doesn’t contribute to the famous cesspool.
